


Inferno Boss

by joojoobe



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hell, Devils, I don't know, Reapers, dantes inferno, mob wars in hell?, muahaha, power struggles, taeyong vs. Mark, very freaking violent, who will win?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-03-21 13:50:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13742265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joojoobe/pseuds/joojoobe
Summary: "Through me you pass into a city of woe...O human race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall?"Welcome to hell. Abandon all hope ye who enter here, unless you are Taeyong. The wicked never lose.Story is based on Dante's Inferno and the Boss music video.





	Inferno Boss

**Author's Note:**

> Authors note:  I can't believe that after writing a whole "All the Trees in the Field Shall Clap Their Hands" I'm writing another NCTxhell story, but after seeing that super sinister Boss mv, I couldn't resist.  This is based on Dante's Inferno, but you don't need to be familiar with it to read this fic. Anyway, this story is going to be fun. Gang wars in hell, mob boss Taeyong and Mark duking it out. What's not to like?   xoxo Joojoobe

A common misconception humans seemed to have about hell was that it was hot. This wasn’t the case. At least not completely. Hell, like any other physical place, had climates. Only the seventh circle had the prototypical boiling rivers of lava and blood so often seen on televisions. The rest of the circles varied from ice cold to swampy and rank.

            Taeyong blinked with dispassion at the middle-aged man gasping at his feet as if he still needed air. He had the kind of face so incredibly bland it was almost the absence of face. His features were indistinct as if smudged by a lazy artist’s watercolor, stocky and short, he was beginning to bald at the crown of his head.

            Taeyong cleared his throat, his arms crossed against the medallions clasped to his sweeping black coat. The man jerked at the sound, for the first time seeming to take in his surroundings. They were in the center of a copse of dogwood trees, it was the deepest of nights, no sunlight filtering through the leaves, no sweet woodland noises. Then again, this wasn’t unusual. Morning never came in this particular forest, nor did anything truly live. They were in _Selva Oscura_ , or the Dark woods: the place of judgement for the already damned.

            And Taeyong, as Arbiter, had dominion over this land.

            “Where am I?” The man asked, looking wildly at the nearly black forest all around them. Then, his eyes widening, he slapped his hand to his stomach, feeling around for a wound. He looked down at his belly and seemed astounded to see no blood there. He let out a small gasp that may have been a laugh of relief.

            “Don’t celebrate yet, Mr. Kim” Taeyong said. “because you are dead.”

            The man’s face fell, horrified.

            “Stabbed in prison. By your own cellmate, no less.” Taeyong said, looking over the notes

Sicheng had given him when he’d brought the man from the realm of the living.

            Taeyong wasn’t sure the man named Kim was listening, he was obviously struck in a panic. He rose to his feet.

            “I can’t be dead. Otherwise I couldn’t be…”

            “Talking?” Taeyong finished for him. The man nodded fervently.

            Taeyong shrugged looking back down at the notes. “Like I said, you were stabbed in prison by your cellmate in your sleep. It punctured through your liver and ruptured your intestines. You barely had time to wake up and react before going into shock and dying soon after. Frankly, I’m just impressed your cellmate managed to smuggle a blade into prison in this day and age of high security. They’re pulling a sheet over your head as we speak, reportedly your body is ten pounds lighter from how much blood you’ve—“

            “Stop!” The man shouted, hands over his ears.

            “Believe me now?” Taeyong asked coldly. He kneeled down so he was eye level to the man, his face a steely mask of indifference. He didn’t care about this doomed human any more or less than any other he judged and condemned. Their lives were small, as inconsequential as flies. This was merely his duty, to sort them into their proper circles of hell so they suffered in proportion to their sins.

            “So what happens now then?” The man asked. “What next?”

            “Why don’t you tell me?” Taeyong replied, his fiery hair falling before his eyes.

            The man was quite bold given his situation. “How the fuck do I know what happens next? Aren’t you supposed to know? You a reaper or something?”

            “No, I’m not, Mr.Kim. You’ve already met my reaper when he brought you to me.” Taeyong leaned closer. He could see the man recoiling away from his coal-black eyes. “I’m arguably something worse.”

            Taeyong stood. Yes, he supposed arbiters like him were much worse than reapers. Reapers did nothing but pluck the dying from the living realm. They delivered souls to hell but they delivered to heaven as well. They could walk through the pearly gates of heaven without immediately catching on fire as Taeyong was sure he and every other entity of hell would, which probably made them just objectively purer. Sicheng reflected this. His reaper wasn’t very dark at all. If anything, he was a little too dreamy, even airheaded at times.

            “Now, let’s not drag this exchange on much longer than we must.” Taeyong said. “From now on, I’ll be the one asking the questions. Each one out of you will be met with punishment.”

            Taeyong circled around Mr.Kim, looking down at him with an icy repose.

            “Give me your confession.”

            Mr.Kim glared at him.

            “What confession?”

            Taeyong was on him before he could even draw a breath, a little black blade emerging from his sleeve. He drew the knife from the middle of his cheek to the corner of his mouth, the flesh parting like a little red sea so the clamped rows of his cigarette stained teeth showed through. Mr.Kim howled, even his screaming a little distorted from the disfigurement of his mouth. The curtains of his rended mouth hung open in thick flaps.

            “I told you questions would be punished.” Taeyong said, wiping the blood off his blade. At the smell of blood, he heard the rustling of the three gatekeeper beasts in the trees circling hungrily: the lion, the leopard and the wolf. Between the trees, he could see the golden glint of the leopard’s eyes as she loped towards them. She butted her great head against Taeyong’s sternum in affection, purring. Mr. Kim, if possible, looked even more terrified.

            Taeyong stroked the leopard’s golden fur. “I’ve heard in some of your human mythologies, it is believed that a three headed dog named Cerebrus guard the gates of hell. Well, now you know it is not so.”

            The man’s mangled mouth was beginning to stitch itself back together, the blood drawing back into the flesh as if by suction. It was only natural: to punish the body, it could not fail. No damage was permanent in the inferno. Here, the bodies of the sinners stitched themselves back together again and again  to be everlastingly tormented.

            “She doesn’t attack anything I don’t give her permission to, but let’s not get to that point Mr.Kim. I’ve no desire to brutalize you. Despite my line of work, I’ve no real taste for blood. Your confession, please.” Taeyong looked down at the blubbering mess of a man at his feet. His face was completely healed, the only hint of violence being the blood soaked through the front of his prison jumper.

            “I don’t know what you want from me!” he wailed.

            Taeyong sighed. “My reaper plucked your soul and deemed it worthy of my judgement. If he hadn’t, you’d be gallivanting with angels or whatever those taken to the skies after dying do for eternity. Instead, here we are. Why? Confess.”

            It took longer than expected. It was a long blur of blood and bone, of a body mending itself again and again to be further brutalized, flashes of feline teeth and claw, but finally Mr.Kim broke, confessing to a litany of sins so awful even Taeyong was clenching his fists in disgust.

            “You transgressed on your daughter until she chose to end her own life.” Taeyong said in a deadpan voice, his words ridiculously censored compared to the unspeakable horrors they alluded to. The man at his feet nodded, his eyes strangely vicious as if he believed he’d had every right to do what he did.

            _This is humanities face._ Taeyong thought fiercely. _There is nothing they won’t do to each other._

            “I damn you to the seventh circle with the other violents.” Taeyong said, words that he knew meant nothing to Mr.Kim for now, but it soon would mean everything. Hell was built like a great tower of concentric circles, the lower down towards the pit, the more wretched the sinners and therefore, the punishments. While lesser sinners such as the gluttons wallowed in filth in the third circle, those in lower circles suffered much more wretched punishments. The seventh circles were for the violent sinners. They boiled in rivers of blood to reflect how they bathed in the blood of their victims in life.

            As soon as the judgement left Taeyong’s lips, a figure emerged from the shadows of the trees.

            “Hi arbiter. You called?” Doyoung asked as casually as one might ask the weather.

            “He’s yours.” Taeyong said with distaste. Doyoung was an overseer of the seventh circle. At a glance, this bunny-faced entity hardly seemed fitting to oversee the most wild and dramatically grotesque circle of hell, but Taeyong had seen him with the doe-eyed mask torn away. He wasn’t placed there for no reason.

            Doyoung grabbed a vicious handful of the judged man’s hair, stopping to give Taeyong polite little bow before evaporating into black smoke.

            The darkwoods were quiet again, only the steady purring of the leopard reminding Taeyong that he was not alone. That elsewhere in the darkwoods, those desiring to steal his position were lurking. Here, the class of arbiter was the closest thing to God in heaven. The arbiter was the ones who decides, the one who damned to the lowest depths of the pit or showed lenience. The one who all other classes of hellish beings deferred to because they were something more. Still, there were murmurs all throughout the realm that a new contender for  arbiter had risen seemingly overnight. No one knew from where he came, or what ring of hell he had emerged from, there was only the name: Mark, whispered in the darkness.

            And he was coming.


End file.
